Back to Basics

“Tens of them”

Hardly a day goes by anymore that Harry Reid doesn’t go out of his way to try and point out how the Tea Party is nearing extinction. In the past three months, Reid has said that the country doesn’t care about the Tea Party, that the movement will be short-lived, and that the Tea Party will disappear faster than a bag of taxpayer money accidentally left in the Democrats’ cloak room.

Yesterday, Reid poked fun of the size of one particular rally:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Friday ridiculed the size of the crowd at a Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill for deep spending cuts.

No more than a couple of hundred activists showed up for the Washington demonstration, many fewer than past Tea Party rallies in the nation’s capital.

“There were tens of them here yesterday. That’s a chosen word, tens of them,” Reid said on a conference call with reporters.

Maybe the rest of them were at work, Harry. Somebody’s got to pay for you to fulfill your constitutional duty, and Arianna, Oprah, Michael Moore and labor unions won’t foot the bill for conservative astroturf. So we’re also stuck having to pay our own way.

The mockery is intended as a message to Tea Party freshmen that they’re hitching their political wagons to a dying horse, but if that were the case you’d think Reid would just shut up and let it happen. As evidenced by Charles Schumer inadvertently revealing the left’s marching orders the other day, Dems clearly don’t believe the Tea Party is over (that’s what the caucus told me to say).

I think Reid’s just in a bad mood because summer is coming, and you know what that means — the smelly tourists will be back.